Images: from the start of the BVI ‘digital sibling’.
insatiable wriggler + strawberry squid
Two poems published in late 2023 as part of Brilliant Vibrating Interface, an anthology of queer poetry from SPAM Press. BVI exists both in book format, and as the ‘digital sibling’ – an interactive, multimedia website. Bringing together work by a generation of ‘digital natives’, the project continues the concerns of Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, including ‘queerness, experiment, hybridity and technology’.
‘insatiable wriggler’ is an ekphrastic response to the slinky orange form within Louise Bourgeois’ 1996 sculpture, untitled. ‘strawberry squid’ addresses the animal of its name, a deep sea creature that is only made visible, from my distant vantage point, by the entrancing videos and hyper-detailed images that were washed up in my hands by the algorithmic tides of the internet.
Extracts from ‘insatiable wriggler’:
bright * as * open * pumpkin
or tangerine tiger or peeled peach
bum tucked under: neat in pleat and patch
slinky
wicked
impish
one
coiled like lamprey in pink bucket, untrusted
in that lithe, sly way
[...]
torso writ as a stem of twisty
ruckles, tusled furtive
(quick squeezed giggle!)
[...]
prehensile slendrous tensile tickling trunk
the suspect is so fiendish sweet:
an imposter trailing puzzled perk
lurid and changed through every frame
or tangerine tiger or peeled peach
bum tucked under: neat in pleat and patch
slinky
wicked
impish
one
coiled like lamprey in pink bucket, untrusted
in that lithe, sly way
[...]
torso writ as a stem of twisty
ruckles, tusled furtive
(quick squeezed giggle!)
[...]
prehensile slendrous tensile tickling trunk
the suspect is so fiendish sweet:
an imposter trailing puzzled perk
lurid and changed through every frame
Fragments from ‘strawberry squid’:
